About the Author

Vindi Birch

Vindi Birch is a nerdy white girl born in Oakland, California on the wrong side of the tracks. She currently resides in the Bay Area with her Frasian boyfriend and two cats. When she's not busy working as a corporate whore for the wonderful world of retail, she loves to read, sing, play video games, watch television and occasionally write. She has been writing short stories, poetry and crappy college papers since she was in high school.

Literary Influences

Vindi is a fan of several different styles of writing and has been an avid reader since she was old enough to steal books from the library. (That's right. Steal. Vindi is hardcore like that.)

"I am a huge fan of anything that is off-the-wall or makes obscure references to things and sometimes I even like to read books that make you think about things! Things are good. As a self-proclaimed nerd, I'm pretty sure that I'm required to say that sci-fi is great and I love Ray Bradbury, Orson Scott Card, Issac Asimov, Phillip K. Dick and guys in that genre. I have guilty kid pleasures like Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl that I like too. But straight-up random fiction like Anthony Burgess, Kurt Vonnegut and Christopher Moore is my true love. I wish I could say I had a specific genre that I'm all about, but I've got everything on my bookshelf from Atlas Shrugged to Dresden Files to Thursday Next to Don Quixote. I've probably devoured over a thousand books in my time and I have a special place in my heart for all of them. Even the bad ones. They're stuck there forever and remind me of what not to do as a writer."

TV and Movies

"I hate it when people who read a lot distainfully say, 'Oh, I don't watch TV' or that 'All the good movies were books anyway.' Fuck them. There are some amazing things that have been made over the last century and if you refuse to watch them because they aren't printed out for you to read so that you can lord it over everyone else how great you are for not watching television or going to the movies with the masses, then you need to pull your head out of your ass. Just like with books, I have a love for (almost) all genres. With movies and television I love classics from the silver screen, bad 80's movies, horror, foreign, drama, comedy, musicals, kid movies, cartoons, documentaries, etc. As long as it's done well, I will watch almost anything."

From resurrecting her parents' Atari in second grade, to convincing all her siblings to pool their Christmas money together to get an NES, to camping outside of Best Buy to get a 360 at launch, to getting sucked into WoW for over five years, video games have always been an important part of Vindi's life.